Abstract

Excluding only pure nominalists and "imagists" he includes in the classical theory "almost everyone who lived before the second decade of the twentieth century." This of course covers most of the other general types of theory found in the epistemology textbooks: that concepts are in the mind, that they are also in the thing, and finally that they are fundamentally prior to the thing. These types may be exemplified by Locke, Aristotle, and Plato, respectively. The controversy between these three schools Price feels can for his purposes be regarded as a "domestic difference within the classical tradition." His subsidiary discussions of these differences he confines almost entirely to the first two. The Platonic theory he handles very lightly and gingerly; "it is a sufficiently difficult task in these days to convince people that there is any sense in talking of universals at all, even in the mild and moderate Aristotelian way".